Staff MemberPremium Member

It turns out that the "next big thing" coming out of Samsung will actually be something very tiny. A new report shares that Samsung was successful in building and testing a new 14nm chip for the mobile world. To put it in perspective, today's ubiquitous Tegra 3 processor is 40nm in size. Some of the newer chips coming out early next year will be built using a 28nm architecture. This new chip will have transistors that are half that size, and will use the ARM Cortex-A7 processor implementation with big.LITTLE configuration. Here's a quote with a few more details,

The 14nm FinFET chips are next generation technology, which will allow "PC-like performance with low power consumption" in future Exynos processors, that are currently done at 32nm. Samsung already embraced the big.LITTLE architecture for upcoming Exynos chips, and the die shrink to 14nm will make it that much more efficient.

Samsung also outed a Process Design Kit (PDK) that will let its customers commence designing chips with the frugal tech with manuals based on the results from its successful 14nm FinFET chip tests. Samsung promised a big.LITTLE Exynos for this year, as you can see in the video below, but it might have waited for successful die shrink tests to place those in devices, and 2013 seems like the safer bet now.

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Although it looks like Samsung is going to be a year behind their projections for getting out he first chips using the big.LITTLE technology, it's still very exciting to see what we get to look forward to next year. Imagine the possibilities of having a chip as powerful as our current desktops, yet energy efficient enough to use in a smartphone. Within the next few years, you will not be able to tell a difference between the computing power of your desktop and the computing power of your mobile device. The line between them will not just blur... it will be erased!

This is very exciting stuff, and a great way to usher in the new year!